I see a lot of support for the insect ants. Ants aren’t workers, ants aren’t proletariats, ants are an army of monarchists. They are the brits of insects They invade other ant colonies
They war with other colonies, they drive out several termite species rendering them extinct- along with other ground dwelling insects. They are also racist.
Actually the view of ants and bees as having monarchy is purely human projection. The Queen of an any colony is not it's ruler, the workers are. Queens are basically dragged around, force fed and treated more like an object than a part of the colony. If they step out of line they are stung to death and replaced.
Ants actually have a completely decentralized system of organizing labor. Each worker forages and scouts autonomously until they find something interesting for the collective, after which they chemically mark the newly discovered ressource. Other ants then follow this trail, which automatically makes them form an organized group that distributes labor evenly to transport the ressource back to the nest. Likewise, all gathered food is shared collectively.
The queen does zero organizational work and has no command over her workers, she just lays eggs to produce more workers. She's as much a part of the collective as any worker ant, only serving a different purpose due to her reproductive ability, and in fact larger colonies tend to have multiple queens in most species. Calling her a queen is anthropomorphizing the relation she has to the rest of the colony, which aren't her subjects, but her children or, in a multi-queen colony, her nieces.
Ants aren't actually monarchists. The girls rule the roost, the queens don't actually exert control on them beyond identifying themselves as queen.
That said, we are locked in battle with them for domination of the earth. It's really a four way fight between ants, rats, humans, and kudzu to rule over the mudball. Who will win? Who will rule over the ruins? Time alone will tell.
Do the ant computers in the Children of Time series count (probably not)? I always found their enslavement to the spiders to be problematic and I hope it is addressed in a later book.
Aren't rats basically just a human parasite (though on the scale of societies and not individual humans)? Same as cockroaches neither of those species prosper out of the ordinary in the wild.
Ants are actually Settler KKKolonialists, its true
Invasive ants are a diverse group of aggressive, competitive ant species that can rapidly
establish and spread. Several ant species are amongst the most serious global invasive
species. Their broad diets, nesting habits, ability to breed rapidly and adaptability to
varied habitats make them excellent invaders. Agricultural, economic, environmental and
social wellbeing are threatened by these ants, many of which have been introduced to,
and established in, many countries
anteaters are actually the true heroes of the proletariat